‘I beg your Grace will cause read this to the Meeting because it is all the defence I have made. I sent another to your Grace from Dunblane, with the reasons of my leaving Edinburgh. I know not if it be come to your hands.’ It is hardly probable that Dundee seriously expected Hamilton and the Convention to be influenced in the course they were bent on adopting by a letter which, as regarded the past, contained little or nothing but what they had heard already, and which in respect to the future, bound the writer for a very limited period, in consideration of purely private and domestic, and not of political circumstances, except, perhaps, the circumstance that the instructions without which he was not to venture on any act of open hostility had not yet come from Ireland. He cannot have been greatly surprised to learn that on the 30th of March he had formerly been declared a traitor. Within less than a fortnight there occurred an incident which supplied Hamilton not only with a justification of the action he had taken, but also with a reason for adopting further measures against Dundee. The Viscount’s commissions as Lieutenant-General and Commander-in-Chief in Scotland had been dispatched from Ireland. They were accompanied with letters from Melfort to both Dundee and Balcarres. To the former he wrote, ‘You will ask, no doubt, how we shall be able to pay our armies: but can you ask such a question while our enemies, the rebels, have estates to be forfeited? We will begin with the great, and end with the small ones.’ The same sentiments were expressed in even stronger terms in his letter to the latter. ‘The estates of the rebels will recompense us. You know there were several Lords whom we marked out, when you and I were together, who deserved no better fates; these will serve as examples to others.’ According to Balcarres, he added the senseless threat, ‘when we get the power we will make these men hewers of wood and drawers of water.’ Whether by the folly or the knavery of the bearer of them, these compromising documents fell into the hands of Hamilton. He communicated them to the Convention. When they had been read, he rose and cried out in an impetuous voice, ‘You hear, you hear, my Lords and Gentlemen, our sentence pronounced. We must take our choice, to die, or to defend ourselves.’